It’s been 3 months since the Mayor’s speech on enabling a “Business 2.0″approach to online serices the City provides (I hope he wasn’t thinking this Business 2.0 approach). Regardless, what the City needs to do is expose the underlying data in formats that are easy to build upon to enable this approach. Starting with these few things would go a long way into enabling “Ottawa’s Leading Technology Community” to build interesting mashups and tools that would benefit all citizens and kickstart some interesting mashups:
- RSS Feeds
The News feed on the main page, as well as other sections should all be available in a subscribable syndication format. I don’t neccsarily want to check the city’s website everyday, but if its streamed in with my other feeds, I might see something I would not have otherwise noticed.
- iCal Syndication
Provide iCal or XML data for any calendars or events such as waste disposal schedules, Council meeting schedules, Arts and recreational events (Swimming schedules, etc). People can then subscribe to these calendars directly from within their Calendar software, or to enable third parties to build interesting tools on top of them.
- Raw XML Data
Provide raw XML data for things like Outdoor Skating rink locations, municipal offices, transit schedules, and recreational facilities. Geotag it. Allow people to consume the data and build things on top of this data. Scraping and cleansing the data from the website is painful and unnceesary when all the underlying data already exists.
- Podcasts
Not everyone has time to watch City Council webcasts at their computer, but if you’re taking the bus in from Orléans, you might throw it on your iPod and watch on the way to work. Assuming the City (not Rogers) maintains the rights to these meetings, syndicate it to iTunes and let people watch it where and when they want.
As an example, and mostly because I wanted to find the closest outdoor skating rink to my house without going through a list of 230 locations and trying to figure out which ones sounded like they might be close - I scraped, geo-tagged, and mapped all of the City’s outdoor skating rink locations. I also tried to make the legend of what is on-site at each rink little easier to understand. At first glance, I had no clue what W, L,S,B was and thought I couldn’t be alone in this. All told, it probably took me about an hour and a half to clean and geotag the data, and a couple more hours to drop it into Google Maps and determine the layout. The most paunful part though, was cleaning the data. If we had clean data like this from the City, they’d have a ton of great mashups.
Features I thought about adding might be the ability to upload photos of each rink, comments on the latest conditions, etc. But for now, I wanted to get it out there so that other people don’t have to suffer through the pain of guessing which rink might be closest.
While the City seems to be moving in the right direction with their online consultation process, allowing people to comment directly on whitepapers is hardly revolutionary, it is a small step in the right direction.
Posted May 15, 2008 
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I missed this when the City announced it May 9th (there are still no RSS newsroom feeds), the City launched a new web-based service to access the Development applications that are in process with the City. The Development Search feature allows you to search based on area, ward, street, or using keywords for things like:
All supporting documentation is available (Site plans, Environmental Assessments, etc.), and there is also a form that can be used to contact the appropriate Planners. This is a big step forward, and definitely improves the accessibility and access to this information.
New: 
